CTP4 (March) of VS/TFS 2012 Update 2 is available

We are continuing our journey to deliver a final release of Update 2. You can read about the CTP3 we shipped a few weeks ago here. The most notable thing about this CTP is that it is “go-live”. One of our big learnings from shipping Update 1 was that we really do need feedback from real customer deployments before we ship a major update. We provided a “go-live” build to a select set of early adopters in the last CTP and got some great feedback. In that process we found 3 or 4 significant bugs and fixed them for this CTP. We now need a bunch more people to give it a go and report any issues they find. If all goes well, we hope to release Update 2 soon.

You can read about the list of new features in this CTP on the ALM team blog.

Chuck’s list on the ALM blog is pretty high level so I want to call out a few TFS specific things:

Back up & restore Power Tool – We’ve now integrated the backup and restore power tool into the product as part of Update 2. There’s be no need to use the Power Tool download for this any longer.

Preserve configuration on upgrade – We did additional work to preserve your TFS configuration when you upgrade. This should make applying update 2 easier.

Servicing in High Availability SQL Environments (SQL AlwaysOn) – We now support upgrade & servicing of SQL AlwaysOn configurations without undo manual intervention.

Customizable kanban columns – We’ve now included that new customizable kanban columns support that I first previewed at the ALM Summit in Update 2. Gregg has also produced a detailed walkthrough of the customizable kanban columns.

Visual Studio Git extension – You will also need a new version of our Git extensions VSIX to work with this Update. It’s not available as I write this but should be within the next day or two. I’ll post another blog post with details on the Git extensions update as soon as I have it. Just to be clear, the Git extensions will not be included in Update 2. For now they will continue to be a separate VSUpdate as we are rapidly iterating on them and plan to continue for the foreseeable future.

At this point all but a few of the planned Update 2 features are in.

Please try it out and give us any feedback you have. Because this is a “go-live” release all our standard support mechanisms are in place for it. Also, you can submit bug reports on Connect.